Ethan White and Morgan Ernest's blog for discussing issues and ideas related to ecology and academia.

A message to journal editors/managers about RSS feeds

If you don’t have an easily accessible RSS feed available (and by easily accessible I mean in the browser’s address bar on your journal’s main page) for your journal’s Table of Contents (TOCs), there is a certain class of readers who will not keep track of you TOCs. This is because receiving this information via email is outdated and inefficient and if you are in the business of content delivery it is, at this point, incompetent for you to not have this option (it’s kind of like not having a website 10 years ago).

If, for some technophobic reason, you refuse to have an RSS feed, then please, pretty please with suger on top, don’t hide the ability to subscribe to the TOCs behind a username/password wall. All you need is a box for people to add their email addresses to for subscribing and a prominent unsubscribe link in the emails (if you are really paranoid you can add a confirmation email with a link that needs to be followed to confirm the subscription).

Most importantly. Please, for the love of all that is good and right in the world, DO NOT START AN RSS FEED AND THEN STOP UPDATING IT. Those individuals who track a large number of feeds in their feed readers will not notice that you stopped updating your feed for quite some time. You are losing readers when you do this.

If you have an RSS feed that is easily accessible (congratulations, you’re ahead of many Elsevier journals) please try to maximize the amount of information it provides. There are three critical pieces of information that should be included in every TOCs feed:

The title (you all manage to do this one OK)

All of the authors’ names. Not just the first author. Not just the first and last author. All of the authors. Seriously, part of the decision making process when it comes to choosing whether or not to take a closer look at a paper is who the authors are. So, if you want to maximize the readership of papers, include all of the authors’ names in the RSS feed.

The abstract. I cannot fathom why you would exclude the abstract from your feed, other than to generate click throughs to your website. Since those of you doing this (yes, Ecology, I’m talking about you) aren’t running advertising, this isn’t a good reason, since you can communicate the information just as well in the feed (and if you’re using website visits as some kind of metric, don’t worry, you can easily track how many people are subscribed to your feed as well).

If this seems a bit harsh, whiny, etc., then keep this in mind. In the last month I had over 1000 new publications come through my feed reader and another 100 or so in email tables of contents. This is an incredible amount of material just to process, let alone read. If journals want readers to pay attention to their papers it is incumbent upon them to make it as easy as possible to sort through this deluge of information and allow their readership to quickly and easily identify papers of interest. Journals that don’t do this are hurting themselves as well as their readers.

Thanks bavb. This has been bothering me for a while and when I realized that the Journal of Theoretical Biology had just shut down it’s RSS feed without notice and then I couldn’t even subscribed to email alerts without a username and password I decided it was time to say something. Now I think I need to write a post explaining the advantages of using RSS (or Atom) feeds so that academics can benefit from this useful resource.